What Is the NI Service Locator and How Do I Troubleshoot It?

Updated Dec 16, 2025

Reported In

Software

  • LabVIEW Full
  • LabVIEW Base
  • LabVIEW Professional

Issue Details

What is the NI Service Locator? What is the purpose of it? If something goes wrong, how do I troubleshoot it?

Solution

The NI Service Locator facilitates communication between National Instruments support programs and services, such as the NI Example Finder and RT Proxy. These programs and services use local dynamic TCP ports to communicate with each other. The NI Service Locator manages these dynamic ports.

Since the Locator runs as a background service, it requires no user interaction. If you suspect there is a problem with the NI Service Locator, you can see the current status of the Locator by browsing to http://localhost:3580/dumpinfo?. This will return a report that details NI Service Locator's current connections.

Additional Information

For LabVIEW 2010-2012, the NI Service Locator was integrated into the NI System Web Server. The executable for the web server in these versions is located at <Program Files>\National Instruments\Shared\NI WebServer\SystemWebServer.exe.


If error messages appear in LabVIEW 2010-2012 that mention the NI Service Locator, with the Example Finder for instance, any troubleshooting steps apply to the NI System Web Server.

From LabVIEW 2013 onward, the NI System Web Server and NI Service Locator were split into separate components again. The executable of the NI Service Locator is located at <Program Files>\National Instruments\Shared\nisvcloc.

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